Ilya Sergey and Evan Cheng join Zilliqa to advise on smart contracts

Zilliqa, a new, high-speed and secure blockchain platform based on the technology of sharding, today announced the additions of Dr. Ilya Sergey and Evan Cheng to their advisory board. Zilliqa has been focused on ‘scalability with security’ since its founding and will use the expertise of the new advisors as the company aggressively grows its development team in preparation for the public release of their technology.

Xinshu Dong, CEO of Zilliqa

“We are building great momentum as we grow our development and marketing teams in preparation for the release of our public testnet and the eventual mainnet launch of our platform,” said Xinshu Dong, CEO of Zilliqa. “Having incredibly talented and knowledgeable advisors like Ilya and Evan with us in the early stages of our development will be a tremendous resource that will help ensure Zilliqa truly addresses the key challenges in building a fast and secure smart contract infrastructure.”

Dr. Sergey researches programming languages, program analysis, and formal verification, and is currently an assistant professor at University College London. His recent focus has been developing scalable methods for building trustworthy concurrent and distributed software, while his earlier work was advancing the state of the art in static analysis for higher-order languages and programming language design. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Sergey worked at JetBrains Inc., a provider of integrated development environments for software developers.

Mr. Cheng is an ACM Software System Award winner for his contribution to LLVM (2012). Currently an engineering director at Facebook, where he oversees development of programming languages, runtimes, and compilers, he is a veteran in the broad field of programming languages.

Solving scalability plus security

The Zilliqa project is a new blockchain platform based on the technology of sharding that was originally proposed by members of the team as researchers at the National University of Singapore back in 2015. Since then, the Zilliqa team has been developed their technology internally and achieved significant milestones that will have a huge impact on one of the most common problems facing public blockchain platforms: scalability.

Scalability, which is typically measured in terms of transactions per second and should increase as the network of computers using the platform grows, is difficult to achieve in a public setting because of security concerns. The security of smart contracts running on public blockchain platforms has increasingly become a topic of concern as more and more applications are beginning to use the technology for business-critical applications.

The architecture underlying Zilliqa is truly unique because it allows for high-throughput on a public blockchain platform without compromising the system or the applications that run on top of it to additional security risks. In addition, Scilla, the new and more secure smart contract programming language has been proposed to run applications on Zilliqa and other blockchains, will help ensure the security of the system.

Zilliqa has stated that the first public testnet of their system that will allow developers to begin testing applications on the network will be released this month.